Abstract: We might begin by asking, what is not electronic literature today? Rather than introduce electronic literature or “e-lit” as a distinct literary category, this course wonders if it’s still possible to consider literature beyond the electronic circuits that characterize the networked present. The creation and study of literature today is facilitated by a range of digital formats and networked consoles, each of which introduce new practices of production, circulation, reception, and reading. Alongside these transformations, we’ll explore a range of new literary genres inhabiting, for example, computer scripts, image macros, flash movies, social media, bandcamp releases, interactive applications, and print on demand books. Thinking through the present, this introduction examines the history and future of literature through the everyday experience of computers and electronic devices. From the history of digital poetics to recent internet publications, we’ll track the development of literature under the influence of computation up to works published in the present, as they emerge throughout the quarter. In lockstep, the course considers the category of “electronic literature” as a way to think about historical works remediated to the internet, in a wide range of (post-)digital formats. The course requires short weekly responses in an open format, as well as a mid-term and final assignment, which may be critical or creative in form, developed in conversation with the instructor. No previous experience in programming, poetry, or literature is required."

[via: "This brilliant mapping of Sebald's The Rings of Saturn by @barbarahui shows/ tracks the multiple, frantic displacements of the journey, allowing you to zoom into the landscape but also see its global connections.
Key viewing for #TheReadingsofSaturn
Here: http://barbarahui.net/litmap/ "

"I created Litmap as part of my Comparative Literature PhD dissertation project. It's a digital map that plots all of the places that are mentioned in W.G. Sebald's novel, The Rings of Saturn.

Litmap is featured in the documentary Patience (After Sebald), directed by Grant Gee. You can also read about the project in this New York Times ArtsBeat post.

If you'd like to read more about the theoretical context for Litmap, following is something I wrote in 2009 to explain the project in the context of my dissertation.

Litmap was created with the goal of enabling humanities scholars to read literature spatially – a mode of reading which I believe to be crucial to understanding contemporary literature and textuality at large today. The Litmap application aims to leverage the strengths of the digital computing platform to present literary narratives in a way that opens up spatial readings of those texts.

If you'd like to read more about the theoretical context for Litmap, following is something I wrote in 2009 to explain the project in the context of my dissertation.

Litmap was created with the goal of enabling humanities scholars to read literature spatially – a mode of reading which I believe to be crucial to understanding contemporary literature and textuality at large today. The Litmap application aims to leverage the strengths of the digital computing platform to present literary narratives in a way that opens up spatial readings of those texts.

What is meant by spatial?

Taking up the call of spatial thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre, Edward Said, Edward Soja, and Doreen Massey, as well as literary “cartographer” Franco Moretti, spatiality is here conceived of in all of its conceptual complexity. This includes a consideration of the geospatial shape of the narrative, i.e. the contours that emerge when the place names mentioned in the texts are plotted on geospatial map image. It also includes attention to the more subjective, slippery—yet no less real—spatialities at work in each narrative, including the scale of global and local place, and the networks of colonialism, imperialism, migration, language, and media that exist across and between those places. The project seeks to represent and examine these networks as they exist in and around literature. Indeed, the network emerges as a crucial spatial paradigm for understanding contemporary narratives.

What is meant by geospatial?

By definition, geospatial is an adjective used to describe or denote data that is associated with a particular location. This is geographical space and place as conceived of in a positivist, empirical way. In other words, the earth is thought of as a spherical surface on which one can plot any location with a certain degree of mathematical accuracy using, for example, numerical latitude and longitude coordinates. The use of numerically precise data means that a range of geospatial calculations can be performed on a given geographical dataset. This is typically carried out via the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), or computer software specializing in the processing of geographical datasets.

Given the utility and free availability of geospatial applications like Google Maps and Google Earth, GIS technology and its attendant geographical representations are becoming rapidly entrenched in our cultural consciousness. Those of us who live in well-mapped locales and have access to networked personal computing technology are growing accustomed to viewing and navigating our surroundings via the use of these geospatial applications.

What is meant by network?

As with the concept of spatiality, the network is here conceived of in both concrete and abstract terms. It includes not only physical networks (wired communications networks, transportation networks, etc.) but also the colonial, imperial, migratory, and linguistic networks constituted by the movements of people, goods, and ideas across geographical space. Additionally, it includes imaginary networks such as those that exist in Stephen Hall’s novel The Raw Shark Texts in which people throw off both tangible and intangible linguistic traces of themselves, and are hunted down via this stream of bait by terrifyingly real yet otherworldly “primordial thought sharks.” In Hall’s novel, each person’s linguistic output is conceived of as a fundamentally material extension of the subject. Litmap allows the reader to map both the concrete geospatial aspects of the novel (“Hull, Leeds, Sheffield” (104)) and also the “un-space” that exists within its spatial imaginary: a labyrinth of tunnels underground, and a trip to a parallel thought world.

Networks are in the general sense “an arrangement or structure with intersecting lines and interstices resembling those of a net” (“Network, N,”). At the interstices exist the nodes of the network. This paradigm of the network is recognizable in many contexts. On geographical maps, the lines are the railroad tracks, roads, and flight paths; the nodes are the stations, villages, towns, and cities (i.e., geographical places) where those lines intersect. The Internet is of course a famous example of a communications network. An early Internet map shows connections between different locations “on the network”: the lines represent data wires, while the nodes are the locations at which those wires meet and the digital data they carry is processed.

The kinds of networks illustrated via Litmap are numerous, with each narrative containing one or often multiple networks, each of a unique configuration. Depending on the kind of spatial information given in each narrative, these networks are plotted with varying degrees of geospatial precision. Sometimes it is possible to map a piece of literature almost entirely down to the street level, while at other times the text requires much more subjective and abstract spatial renderings.

What is meant by place?

In keeping with spatial theorist Doreen Massey, I contend that places be defined as the nodes that are constituted by the intersection of multiple lines or paths of social networks. As she describes it:

[W]hat gives a place its specificity is not some long internalized history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus. If one moves in from the satellite towards the globe, holding all those networks of social relations and movements and communications in one’s head, then each ‘place’ can be seen as a particular, unique, point of their intersection. It is, indeed, a meeting place. Instead then, of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they can be imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings, but where a large proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself, whether it be a street, a region, or even a continent. (28)

Thus places denoted by markers on map images are not fixed, immobile, bounded entities with unified histories, but rather dynamic, socially defined “moments.” While it is true that each latitude and longitude point would still exist on the map without an attached pin (or place), it is crucial to understand that these mathematically-defined coordinates do not give place its particularity, nor did that place as place exist a priori. Rather, it is the fact of the intersection of various social networks at that location which give it its very definition as place. As Massey argues, localities do have specificity, but – and this is crucial – they are defined on a far larger scale than that of their geospatially immediate bounded surroundings.

The built-in ability of digital mapping interfaces to zoom in for a local view and out for a global view, coupled with the ability to programmatically draw connecting lines between places based on certain predefined criteria, make for a platform inherently adept at representing the local-global, networked nature of space and place that Massey so compellingly argues for. The user of Litmap can therefore zoom in to examine the particularities of a place mentioned in a text and then zoom out to look at the way in which it is connected to other locations within that text’s spatial imaginary.

"One of the most famous attempts to describe Los Angeles depicts it as an enclave of communities without a focused core; a collective search for a pulse that does not exist. One version of this characterization suggests, “Los Angeles: seventy-two suburbs in search of a city.” Another narrows the scope: “nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.” Assigned to a series of writers, most famously Dorothy Parker, but also Aldous Huxley and H.L. Mencken, the words reverberate an anxiety about Angelenos’ collective experiences of space.[1] Pointing to the uniqueness of Los Angeles’s geography and topography, it also reveals the challenge of trying to capture the essence of a multi-nodal place with words alone. This essay examines how digital mapping can help to foreground localized knowledges of Los Angeles by introducing a pilot multimedia project called the Barrio Suburbanism Map.

In recent years, the digital-turn has birthed a new version of spatial musings similar to those of Parker, often in the form of maps. Rather than plotting points on a grid, digital mapping often combines practices of cartography, photography, narration, active revision, and public-orientation. These contemporary multimedia renderings demonstrate the continued active and critical searching for what it means to live in metropolitan Los Angeles. From this search, several questions emerge. Who decides what a place is called: barrio, suburb, neighborhood, ghetto, colonized territory? Where are its edges? How does a space become more than a location, but instead a site imbued with meaning? And, to whom? These questions move us beyond the iconic scene of Los Angeles produced from the studios of the Hollywood Hills to the lived experiences of space radiating out from Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights to the Tierra Mia coffee shop in Huntington Park. This essay explores how digital mapping might inform our understanding of metropolitan Los Angeles, both in the academy and beyond. Specifically, by pairing photographs with student ethnographies, the Barrio Suburbanism Map complicates popular perceptions of the suburbs as sites of homogeneity in order to reveal the dynamic diversity of suburbanization in multiracial Los Angeles, with a focus on Latinx communities.

Since the writings of 1920s social commentators, a range of urban historians, planners, creative writers, artists, and preservationists have created a wealth of scholarship and resources concerning Los Angeles and its suburbs: as bustling sites of working class identity, as spaces of queer sociability, and as areas of relocation for urban Chicanxs.[2] Yet, suburbs are habitually understood through the lenses of homeownership, whiteness, middle-class status, and conservatism in popular discourse. These depictions of suburbs eclipse the equally important histories of “triangular race relations” and “relational racialization” exemplified in places like Los Angeles, where complex interactions between race, class, and gender have accompanied the social segmentation of the metropolitan region.[3] Rather than a fixed set of characteristics, suburbia is networked, ever shifting, historically contingent, and defined by much more than political boundaries.[4]

This essay explores how digital mapping can function as an active means for engaging ongoing process of place-making, one that can offer unique contributions to both student learning and public engagement.[5] Beginning with a brief account of digital mapping projects in Greater Los Angeles, this essay provides a series of mosaics from one such project designed by the authors, the Barrio Suburbanism Map. A collaborative research project created by UCLA undergraduates in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies, its aims are two-fold. First, it builds upon studies of the barrio and diverse suburbs to examine how these sites operate in multiracial and metropolitan contexts. Second, it foregrounds undergraduate research aimed at reaching a public audience through multimedia mapping. Piloted in an upper-division research seminar in the Winter of 2016, the project asks how Chicana/o and Latina/o populations have impacted the economic, social, and spatial contours of specific suburbs, with attention to how place-making and the built environment have changed over time."

…

"Through digital mapping, projects like the Barrio Suburbanism Map facilitate public-oriented research and student engagement in that process. By pairing photographs with student ethnographies, the map seeks to complicate popular perceptions of suburbia. It highlights the dynamic diversity of suburbanization in multiracial Los Angeles, with a focus on Latinx migration and settlement that aims to provoke critical discussion. In particular, it foregrounds how Latinx suburbanites impact the spatial and ideological contours of Greater Los Angeles. Rather than statistically driven mapping, these types of projects offer a more humanistic approach for interpreting space with the potential to train students in historical analysis. This is the first layer of an exponentially buildable platform. Future iterations, for instance, could introduce new layers to the present map that address labor history, housing prices, racial housing covenants, predatory lending, or fair housing activism, as well as artistic, literary, and architectural interventions in suburban spaces. As noted by the editors of Hypercities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities, “thick maps are never finished and meanings are never definite… and give rise to forms of counter-mapping, alternative maps, multiple voices, and on-going contestations.” In this way, digital mapping offers a promising opportunity to develop pedagogical and public initiatives that are responsive to the changing conditions of the world we live in."

"Based on the Introduction to Digital Humanities (DH101) course at UCLA, taught by Johanna Drucker (with David Kim) in 2011 and 2012, this online coursebook (and related collection of resources) is meant to provide introductory materials to digital approaches relevant to a wide range of disciplines. The lessons and tutorials assume no prior knowledge or experience and are meant to introduce fundamental skills and critical issues in digital humanities.

Concepts & Readings section resembles a DH101 syllabus, each topic is presented as a lesson plan. Concepts are discussed broadly in order to make connections between critical ideas, hands-on activities, readings and relevant examples. These lesson plans contain lots of individual exercises to be done in class that allow the students to become familiar with the most basic aspects of digital production (html + css, design mockup, metadata schema, etc.). These in-class assignments are geared towards fostering the understanding of the concepts introduced in the lessons: seeing how ‘structured data’ works in digital environments; working with classification and descriptive standards; learning to “read” websites; thinking about the epistemological implications of data-driven analysis and spatio-temporal representations; and, most broadly, recognizing both the ‘hidden’ labor and the intellectual, subjective process of representing knowledge in digital forms. Assignments often only require text editors, commonly available (or free) software, writing and critical engagement and collaboration.

The Tutorial section focuses on tools used in the course. These tutorials are meant to serve as basic introductions with commentaries that relate their usage to the concepts covered in the lectures. The exhibits, text analysis, data visualization, maps & timelines, wireframing and html are required individual components of the final project. Students become familiar with all of these digital approaches throughout the course in the weekly lab/studio sessions, but they are also asked to delve further into a few areas in consultation with the lab instructor to choose the right tools for the types of analysis and presentation they have in mind. The goal is not only the successful implementation of the tools, but also the recognition of their possibilities and limitations during the process.

Using the cumulative and collaborative final project model of DH101, the Student Projects section represents one approach of incorporating all of the above for a more substantial and ‘packaged’ undergraduate project. The process begins with a research topic chosen by the student(s), and the group develops subtopics and the required components, culminating as the “scholarly resource site” that provides useful introduction for the topic. This section also contains suggestions for evaluation and expected time/labor for completion.

In compiling these ideas and resources from DH101, we emphasize the flexibility of these concepts and methods for instruction for any course with varying levels of engagement with digital tools. We hope to also continue to add other approaches as they emerge. We invite suggestions and submissions from instructors and students, including syllabi, tutorials, and case studies.

These materials are authored. If you use them, please cite them as you would any other publication. They are freely available for use, but if you cut, paste, and incorporate them into your own lessons, be sure to include a link and citation of this resource. If you would like to change, correct, or add to anything in this coursebook, please contact us. We would like to keep this current and useful.

"In both theory and practice, this seminar brushes against four popular assumptions about digital humanities: 1) as a service to researchers, the field merely develops digital resources for online discovery and builds computational tools for end-users; it does not interpret texts or meaningfully engage with “pre-digital” traditions in literary and cultural criticism; 2) digital humanities is not concerned with the literary or aesthetic character of texts; it is a techno-solutionist byproduct of instrumentalism and big data; 3) digital humanities practitioners replace cultural perspectives with uncritical computer vision; instead of privileging irony or ambivalence, they use computers to “prove” reductive claims about literature and culture, usually through graphs and totalizing visualizations; and 4) to participate in the field, you must be fluent in computer programming, or at least be willing to treat literature and culture quantitatively; if you are not a programmer, then you are not doing digital humanities.

During our seminar meetings, we will counter these four assumptions by examining, historicizing, and creating “design fictions,” which Bruce Sterling defines as “the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change.” Design fictions typically have a futurist bent to them. They speculate about bleeding edge technologies and emerging dynamics, or they project whiz-bang worlds seemingly ripped from films such as Minority Report. But we’ll refrain from much futurism. Instead, we will use technologies to look backwards and prototype versions of texts that facilitate interpretative practice. Inspired by Kari Kraus’s conjectural criticism, Fred Moten’s second iconicity, Bethany Nowviskie and Johanna Drucker’s speculative computing, Karen Barad’s notion of diffraction, Jeffrey Schnapp’s small data, Anne Balsamo’s hermeneutic reverse-engineering, and deformations by Lisa Samuels, Jerome McGann, and Mark Sample, we will conduct “what if” analyses of texts already at hand, in electronic format (e.g., page images in a library’s digital collections).

Doing so will involve something peculiar: interpreting our primary sources by altering them. We’ll substitute words, change formats, rearrange poems, remediate fictions, juxtapose images, bend texts, and reconstitute book arts. To be sure, such approaches have vexed legacies in the arts and humanities. Consider cut-ups, constrained writing, story-making machines, exquisite corpses, remixes, tactical media, Fluxkits, or détournement. Today, these avant-garde traditions are ubiquitous in a banal or depoliticized form, the default features of algorithmic culture and social networks. But we will refresh them, with a difference, by integrating our alterations into criticism and prompting questions about the composition of art and history today.

"This collection aggregates manifestos concerned with making as a subpractice of the digital humanities."

…

"This archive is an academic resource dedicated to aggregating and cataloging manifestos that fall under two basic criteria. 1) The Digital Manifesto Archive features manifestos that focus on the political and cultural dimensions of digital life. 2) The Digital Manifesto Archive features manifestos that are written, or are primarily disseminated, online.

The manifesto genre is, by definition, timely and politically focused. Further, it is a primary site of political, cultural, and social experimentation in our contemporary world. Manifestos that are created and disseminated online further this experimental ethos by fundamentally expanding the character and scope of the genre.

Each category listed on the archive is loosely organized by theme, political affiliation, and (if applicable) time period. While the political movements and affiliations of the manifestos archived in each category are not universal, each category does try to capture a broad spectrum of political moods and actions with regard to its topic.

This site is meant to preserve manifestos for future research and teaching. The opinions expressed by each author are their own.

This archive was created by Matt Applegate. Our database and website was created by Graham Higgins (gwhigs). It is maintained by Matt Applegate and Yu Yin (Izzy) To
You can contact us at digitalmanifestoarchive@gmail.com.

This project is open source. You can see gwhigs' work for the site here: Digital Manifesto Archive @ Github.com"

"This summer I attended the first annual Institute for Liberal Arts Digital Scholarship (ILiADS) at Hamilton College. It was an inspiring conference, highlighting the importance of collaborative faculty/student digital work at small liberal arts colleges. My own school, Davidson College, had a team at ILiADS (Professor Suzanne Churchill, Instructional Technologist Kristen Eshleman, and undergraduate Andrew Rikard, working on a digital project about the modernist poet Mina Loy). Meanwhile I was at the institute to deliver the keynote address on the final day. Here is the text of my keynote, called “Your Mistake was a Vital Connection: Oblique Strategies for the Digital Humanities.”"

"Overview
The final project is a “port”—a kind of translation—of a work of electronic literature from one platform to another, not necessarily digital, platform. The process of porting forces one to define the “essence” of a work, and also reveals a great deal about the affordances of technology. The final project is due at the Digital Project Showcase, December 9, 3:30-5pm in the Lilly Gallery.

Rationale
Adapting a program from one hardware system to another is “porting,” a term derived from the Classical Latin portare—to carry or bear, not unlike the carrying across (trans + latus) of translation. A port is borne from one platform to another, and the bearer is the programmer or designer, who attempts to preserve the program’s essential properties from one platform to the next.

A translator faces the same challenges. Think about the questions that arise when translating a poem. Where does the poetry of the poem lie? Where is its poemness? In its rhythm? Its rhyme? Its diction? Its layout? Its constraints? Its meanings? Which of these must be carried over from one language to another in order to produce the most faithful translation?

In Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei (1987), a study of the act and art of translation, Eliot Weinberger reads nineteen different translations of a four-line, 1,200-year-old poem by the Chinese master Wang Wei, attentive to the way translators have reinterpreted the poem over the centuries, even as they attempted to be faithful to the original. With a single word, a translator may create a perspective unseen in Wei’s original, radically shift the mood of the poem, or transform it into complete tripe. Many times these changes come about as the translator tries to improve the original in some way. Yet translation, Weinberger writes, ought to be “dependent on the dissolution of the translator’s ego: an absolute humility toward the text” (17).

We who port face similar challenges. What must be preserved when a work of electronic literature is carried across to a new platform: the work’s interface? Its narrative or themes? Its interactivity? Its aesthetic design? The underlying algorithms? The constraints of the original? And should the port try to improve upon the original? Or perhaps “break” the original, by exposing its insides? Where does our humility come into play? The ethos of adaptation will vary from port to port and writer to writer; what you choose to prioritize will help to determine the qualities of the final port and its relationship to the original program.

Getting Started
As you work on your port, think about your source material in terms of the elements of digital literature we’ve studied: data, process, surface, interaction, context. Any of these elements might be “portable”—the aspect of the work you focus on transforming into another platform. Also think about how the rules of notice and signification come into play with the source work, and how those rules might be transformed in the new medium.

Another way to approach the port is to focus on the seemingly most essential digital affordances of the work and turn them into something else, even their opposites. For example, if the source offers a relatively straightforward narrative, turn it into a wiki. Or if the work focuses heavily on images, render that textually. Or vice-versa.

I encourage you to review your private sketchbook for ideas. Also reread the public sketchbooks. There may be something buried there, some seed of an idea that could blossom into a compelling project.

Finally: be bold. Unlike Weinberger, I believe you can have “absolute humility toward the text” while at the same time producing something radically different from the text.

Timeline
• Thursday, November 19: Proposal due (includes name of source work, medium of the port, and a project work plan)
• Thursday, December 3: Minimally Viable Port (MVP) due
• Wednesday, December 9: Final version due at the the Digital Project showcase, with the statement and reflection due by midnight on the same day

Project Statement and Reflection
In an addition to the port itself, you must write a project statement and reflection of 1,500-2,000 words. In this document you’ll reflect on the choices you made, what your port reveals about the original, and what you learned about the process of porting. Use the statement and reflection to address the criteria below that aren’t self-evident in the port itself. The best demonstrations of your project’s engagement with the themes of this course will be explicit analyses of and connections to various readings, theories, and material from the class (e.g. affordances, five elements of digital literature, properties of digital media environments, etc.)

Evaluation
The port will be assessed according to the following criteria:

• Essence (the degree to which your port captures the source’s essence, however you define that)
• Insight (the extent to which you uncover and articulate surprises and insights about the source material through the porting process)
• Craft (the degree of mastery of the mode of composition or representation of the port)
• Intention (the sense of intentionality and deliberateness of the work)
• Theme (the level of engagement with ideas from this class and its online counterpart)
• Synthesis (the way you mobilize both your port and the original material to make some broader hypothesis or claim that matters)

Suggested Sources
• The works of Dreaming Methods
• The works of Jason Nelson
• The works of Christine Wilks
• The works of Alan Bigelow
• The works of Kate Pullinger
• Pieces from the first and second volumes of the Electronic Literature Collection
• Works in the ELMCIP Knowledge Base
• Works in the Pathfinders project
• Works in the Interactive Fiction Database"

"Today, English is much more than writing--it is integrated communications, technology, social networking, gamification, and integrated hybrid/online/and face to face learning management and course design. The lines between journalism and communication and English are blurred. Digital Media is something I do, and I do it well. History isn't just the study of dead people doing stuff--it is also using big data for predictive analysis of future trends, providing research for global temperature studies, digitizing historical maps, and analyzing political movements. Art is science redefined as data becomes understandable through visualizations, infographics, and stunning graphics. We see art in video games, movies, and in and on every object we could imagine. It has become a complete integration in our lives. Music is psychology and business and technology all wrapped into a tune--and its popularity and spread has never been greater.

So, perhaps the death of humanities has been announced too soon. As I sit here, I wonder who will teach the students the skills they need to succeed in this new entrepreneurial world of technology without the humanities. I wonder where advertising and business will get their content and their digital storytelling. I wonder who will write the background music for their next big technology conference, and I muse about who will keep track of all that is happening so that we don't have to reinvent the wheel every five years.

But even as many of those in Humanities are grasping the brass ring of innovation in Digital Media, pulling in grants, research funds, and renown--we are thrown into the street. The professors who were accountable to the college, who the students could count on for referrals and advice, and mentorship are being let go and replaced by part-timers who are underpaid and who owe no allegiance to the college. Who could blame them for doing as little as possible--when most are paid less than $2,000 to teach a class for 15 weeks (In case you are keeping track, that averages out to about $134 a week for a class that includes three hours of teaching and seven hours of prep each week. That means they are making about $13 an hour with a Ph.D.).

So, I will do my best to keep from taking one of those jobs. Not only is it an insult to me, and my talent, education, and experience, but if I take an adjunct position now because there are no full-time jobs--I will only exacerbate the situation.

So, join me. Keep the humanities professional, and the jobs full-time by refusing to take an adjunct position. Instead get jobs as writers, journalists, marketing professionals, and social media specialists. If you have to, get a job doing something completely unrelated to the humanities, but keep writing and creating in your own space and on your own time. This is the only way we will force the hand of the universities and, of course, increase our worth in the workplace so that we won't be willing to come back for a paltry sum.

We need to stand together. We need to starve the colleges of their cheap labor. We need to succeed in other professions. Then, and only then, will we save humanities."

"Five years ago in this space I attempted what I saw as a meaningful formulation of critical thinking—as opposed to the more vapid definitions you tend to come across in higher education. Critical thinking, I wrote, “stands in opposition to facile thinking. Critical thinking is difficult thinking. Critical thinking is being comfortable with difficulty.”

Two hallmarks of difficult thinking are imagining the world from multiple perspectives and wrestling with conflicting evidence about the world. Difficult thinking faces these ambiguities head-on and even preserves them, while facile thinking strives to eliminate complexity—both the complexity of different points of view and the complexity of inconvenient facts.

Adam Kirsch’s much-discussed rejoinder to the digital humanities pivots on a follow-up post of mine, also about critical thinking. In this post—which later appeared in Debates in the Digital Humanities—I argue that most of the work we ask our students to produce is designed to eliminate ambiguity and complexity. It is ironic that Kirsch concludes my vision of difficult thinking represents nothing less than “the obsequies of humanism”—ironic because Kirsch’s piece is itself a remarkable example of facile thinking.

Others have already underscored the paranoid logic (Glen Worthey), glaring omissions (Ryan Cordell), and poor history (Tim Hitchcock) in Kirsch’s piece. You might also read Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s and Lisa Rhody’s recent Working the Digital Humanities essay in differences as a pre-emptive commentary on Kirsch. And finally, The New Republic has published a letter from the authors of Digital_Humanities, disputing Kirsch’s claims.I don’t have much more to add about the particulars of Kirsch’s essay, other than to say that I already wrote a response to it—back in 1998. (In an issue of Works and Days that focused on the scholarship of teaching with technology, which even then was “taking over” English Departments—inasmuch as faculty were using word processors instead of typewriters.)

I do have something to say about the broader context of Kirsch’s essay. It’s part of a growing body of work committed to approaching the intersection of technology and the humanities with purely facile thinking. This facile thinking ignores contradictory evidence, dismisses alternative ways of seeing, and generally places its critiques of the digital humanities in the service of some other goal having little to do with either technology or the humanities. It might be click bait for page views, it might be purely self-promotional, it might be crisis opportunism, and occasionally it’s even a sincere but misdirected criticism. For example, in the case I explored in 1998, anxieties about teaching with technology were really anxieties about teaching, full stop.

The facile thinking about the digital humanities comes from both within and without the academy. It appears on blogs and social media. It’s printed in The Chronicle of Education and Inside Higher Ed, The New York Times and Slate. It’s in scholarly journals, wrapped in the emperor’s new clothes of jargon and theory. It comes from accomplished scholars, librarians, graduate students, journalists and interns, former academics, and university administrators. In nearly every case, the accounts eliminate complexity by leaving out history, ignoring counter-examples, and—in extreme examples—insisting that any other discourse about the digital humanities is invalid because it fails to take into consideration that particular account’s perspective. Here facile thinking masterfully (yes, facile thinking can be masterful) twists the greatest strength of difficult thinking—appreciating multiple perspectives, but inevitably not all perspectives—into its fatal weakness.

In one sensible comment about Kirsch’s account of the digital humanities, Ted Underwood reminds us that we can’t govern reception of our work. We can’t control how others think or talk or write about our work. I agree, but the problem—diagnosed by Matt Kirschenbaum, again in differences—is that so often the facile thinking about the digital humanities isn’t focused on our actual work, but rather on some abstract “construct” called the digital humanities. Matt thoroughly (and with humor) dismantles this construct. But more to my observation about facile thinking here, let me add a corollary to Ted’s point about reception. And this has to do with audience. We often mistake ourselves as the audience for other people’s work. However, the intended audience for facile thinking about the digital humanities is rarely people who work at the intersection of technology and the humanities. Very often there is a third (or fourth or fifth) party involved. Whomever you think a critic of the digital humanities is addressing, there is always someone else being addressed. This doesn’t just happen in the discussions outside of the academy, like Kirsch’s essay in The New Republic. It happens when academics appear to be talking only to each other. Let’s say one digital humanist levels an inflammatory charge against another. The charge is not really directed toward the second digital humanist; it is a charge meant to resound among another audience entirely. Facile thinking about the digital humanities is a performance, not scholarship.

What we need, obviously, is more difficult thinking about the digital humanities. I’m hardly the first to call for such a thing. Alan Liu is looking for more cultural criticism in the digital humanities, while Fred Gibbs wants critical discourse in the digital humanities. I’m dissatisfied with that word “critical” and all its variations—that’s why my formulation emphasizes difficult thinking over facile thinking. In other words, I don’t care whether you’re critical or not about the digital humanities—either the construct or its actual pedagogical and scholarly work. I simply want you to practice difficult thinking. That means evidentiary-based reasoning. That means perspectives not your own. Taken together, these add up to a kind of rational empathy. Show me how rational empathy means the death knell of the humanities and I’ll gladly take over the obsequies myself."

"A book may only be made of paper, cardboard, ink, and glue, but it is nonetheless a remarkable piece of technology—about which we have mostly forgotten it is a piece of technology. This class is concerned with the long history, the varied present, and the uncertain future of the book in the digital age.

We will approach the history of the book in the most materialist way possible. In other words, when we say “books,” we don’t mean novels. We don’t mean texts. We mean books, the actual physical objects. Books have heft. They burn. They mildew. They smell. Their shape and design limit certain uses and encourage others. Similarly, books in the future—or whatever replaces books—will foster certain practices over others.

Over the course of the semester History and Future of the Book will return again and again to three central questions: (1) What is the history of the book as a physical and cultural object? (2) How have current disruptions in reading and writing technology changed the way we use and imagine books? (3) What does the future of the book look like?

Along the way we will consider reading and writing innovations such as electronic paper, e-readers, touchscreen interfaces, DIY publishing experiments, and place-based authoring. We will also address what some critics call the phenomenon of bookishness in contemporary culture—an exaggeration of the most “bookish” elements of a book, which may represent either the last dying gasp of the printed book or herald a renaissance of the form"

"Welcome to Sensate, a peer-reviewed, open-access, media-based journal for the creation, presentation, and critique of innovative projects in the arts, humanities, and sciences.

Our mission is to provide a scholarly and artistic forum for experiments in critical media practices that expand academic discourse by taking us beyond the margins of the printed page. Fundamental to this expansion is a re-imagining of what constitutes a work of scholarship or art. To that end, Sensate accepts and encourages non-traditional submissions such as audiovisual ethnographic research, multimedia mash-ups, experiments in media archaeology, time-based media, participatory media projects, or digitized collections of archival media, artifacts, or maps. Sensate accepts submissions of finished projects, proposals, and reviews of works (monographs, films, exhibitions, etc).

As an issueless journal, Sensate avoids the rigid structures of chronology and provides readers with the opportunity to explore the content in networked and associative ways, offering a rich, intuitive experience. Users can sort the content by clicking on the media icons, selecting one of our Special Collections (curated by Guest Editors), or through advanced search queries.

Sensate uses Zeega, an interactive storytelling platform, to provide a unique tool for non-linear, open-source, multi-media publishing. Zeega allows contributors to seamlessly integrate audio, video, text, and maps from across the Internet, and will be made available to the public in August, 2012. Sign up here for updates and to receive a Zeega account. Projects, proposals, and reviews that do not use Zeega are also welcome and encouraged.

All works featured in Sensate are published under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license. For more information on licensing and copyright, please see our Terms of Use.

The staff of Sensate would like to express our sincere appreciation for the support and guidance provided to us by our colleagues at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, The Film Study Center, metaLAB@Harvard, the Sensory Ethnography Lab, as well as our associates at Zeega. Thank You!"

"“Landscape turns” and “spatial turns” are referred to throughout the academic disciplines, often with reference to GIS and the neogeography revolution that puts mapping within the grasp of every high-school student. By “turning” we propose a backwards glance at the reasons why travelers from so many disciplines came to be here, fixated upon landscape, together.

For the broader questions of landscape – worldview, palimpsest, the commons and community, panopticism and territoriality — are older than GIS, their stories rooted in the foundations of the modern disciplines. These terms have their origin in a historic conversation about land use and agency."

"What is the Spatial Turn?
The Spatial Turn in Literature
The Spatial Turn in Architecture
The Spatial Turn in Sociology
The Spatial Turn and Religion
The Spatial Turn in Psychology
The Spatial Turn in Anthropology
The Spatial Turn in Art History
The Spatial Turn in History"

"This interview with visual and cultural theorist and practitioner Johanna Drucker by Janneke Adema focuses on Drucker’s work as a scholar and practitioner, speculative computing, the difference between aesthesis and mathesis in Humanities knowledge production, and the concept of performative materiality. The interview was conducted on November 16th, 2013, at the Library of Birmingham in Birmingham, UK."

Johanna Drucker is the inaugural Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art, and digital humanities. In addition, she has a reputation as a book artist, and her limited edition works are in special collections and libraries worldwide. Her most recent titles include SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Speculative Computing (Chicago, 2009), and Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide (Pearson, 2008, 2nd edition late 2012). She is currently working on a database memoire, ALL, the online Museum of Writing in collaboration with University College London and King's College, and a letterpress project titled Stochastic Poetics. A collaboratively written work, Digital_Humanities, with Jeffrey Schnapp, Todd Presner, Peter Lunenfeld, and Anne Burdick is forthcoming from MIT Press."

"New School professor Shannon Mattern presents the short talk “Beyond the Seminar Paper: Setting New Standards for New Forms of Student Work” at the October 18, 2011 CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative meeting at the CUNY Graduate Center."

"Bamboo DiRT is a registry of digital research tools for scholarly use. Developed by Project Bamboo, Bamboo DiRT makes it easy for digital humanists and others conducting digital research to find and compare resources ranging from content management systems to music OCR, statistical analysis packages to mindmapping software."

Scalar is a free, open source authoring and publishing platform that’s designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online. Scalar enables users to assemble media from multiple sources and juxtapose them with their own writing in a variety of ways, with minimal technical expertise required.

More fundamentally, Scalar is a semantic web authoring tool that brings a considered balance between standardization and structural flexibility to all kinds of material. It includes a built-in reading interface as well as an API that enables Scalar content to be used to drive custom-designed applications. If you’re dealing with small to moderate amounts of structured content and need a lightweight platform that encourages improvisation with your data model, Scalar may be the right solution for you.

Scalar also gives authors tools to structure essay- and book-length works in ways that take advantage of the unique capabilities of digital writing, including nested, recursive, and non-linear formats. The platform also supports collaborative authoring and reader commentary. The ANVC’s partner presses and archives are now beginning to implement Scalar into their research and publishing workflows, and several projects leveraging the platform have been published already.

Scalar is a project of the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture (ANVC) in association with Vectors, IML, and CTS and with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities."

"they are values of an incorporeal world, made corporeal, to the great disruption of accepted political structures."

…

"this talk is as much about describing new landmarks on the landscape of the semi-consensual hallucination that is our shared reality, as it is about the people doing strange things on the internet."

…

"For the purposes of this next bit, I dub myself Pope, so that I may canonize a saint for the internet, and that saint shall be Jorge Luis Borges. He gave us the Library of Babel, and we are endeavoring as hard and fast as we can to give it back to him."

…

"All this is to say that because I study and am part of something largely illegible to 20th century taxonomies, but born of them, I have to use the language of the wrong century to describe my life. My problem is I need a new literature to describe network culture in terms that are true to itself, your problem is you need a new science to do the same."

…

"People don’t go online to become someone else, they go online and the network makes them into many selves, all as true in the moment as any other, and all changing the world with their tiny ephemeral footprints, making a trillion memories none of us will ever remember to remember, all watched over by machines of loving grace.

Let us consider how all these lies are, in fact, more true than all of our statistics about them."

…

"There is an aesthetic crisis in writing, which is this: how do we write emotionally of scenes involving computers? How do we make concrete, or at least reconstructable in the minds of our readers, the terrible, true passions that cross telephony lines? Right now my field must tackle describing a world where falling in love, going to war and filling out tax forms looks the same; it looks like typing."

"Proposal Location : Major US Cities with city-owned abandoned lots, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington DC. Case study developed for San Francisco.

Local Code : Real Estates uses geospatial analysis to identify thousands of publicly owned abandoned sites in major US cities, imagining this distributed, vacant landscape as a new urban system. Using parametric design, a landscape proposal for each site is tailored to local conditions, optimizing thermal and hydrological performance to enhance the whole city’s ecology—and relieving burdens on existing infrastructure. Local Code’s quantifiable effects on energy usage and stormwater remediation eradicate the need for more expensive, yet invisible, sewer and electrical upgrades. In addition, the project uses citizen participation to conceive a new, more public infrastructure as well —a robust network of urban greenways with tangible benefits to the health and safety of every citizen."

"of course we could make the infographic, but we need to keep pushing ourselves as an agency to do larger, more programmatic engagements…

Infographics are a high-level tactic that is good for educated audiences; they are not actually good for consumer audiences…

We look for a clearly demarcated point of contact; someone who is either empowered with decision-making abilities themselves or who can internally “socialize” ideas and come back to us…

We also look for focus…

I rely on three pillars for inspiration. Pillar No. 1 is entrepreneurship & leadership. I look for entrepreneurial leaders that have been in my shoes at some point building a company, people like Sheryl Sandberg [COO of Facebook]. Seeing how other people are thriving and surviving inspires me.

The second pillar would be social sciences. I have a background in gender studies, anthropology, political science and economics, & they all frame how I think about approaching client problems.

If you, as curators and archivists and generally anyone involved in the preservation of promotion of cultural heritage, think that the authority record is the pinnacle of your careers – that is, the most important thing you will leave behind – then you are about to be eaten by robots.

I am here to suggest that this the work we need to face in the years to come because the unit of measure for whether or not something is important is no longer dictated by the cost of inclusion.

Google has never wavered from their goal of being an information retrieval company because “information retrieval” is just a benign way of saying “everything”. If every natural language researcher on the planet uses Wikipedia as its training set Google was clever enough to realize that they could do what Facebook is trying to do by building a suite of tools – often very good tools – and treat the entire Internet as their training set for teaching robots how to interpret meaning and assign value.

Dispute is notoriously difficult to codify, especially in a database, but one of its most important functions is to shine a light on two or more opposing views so that might better see the context in which those ideas exist. I am not suggesting that we do away with structured metadata but this is not necessarily where all of your time is most needed today. You have the gift of magic that no robot will ever have: We call it language and story-telling and these are the things that you are good at.

I am saying that by encouraging documentary efforts outside the scope of the contemporary zeitgeist we create a zone of safekeeping for historical records and their stories for a time when we are ready to reconsider them.

I am saying that all those works not yet deemed worthy of a scholar’s attention still have value to people and their inclusion within a larger body of work is an important and powerful gesture for encouraging participation. Consider the authority record as a kind of gateway drug to scholarship.

"When we relegate the humanities to a bunch of trends and statistics and frequencies, we get exactly that disconcerting and incongruous dystopia of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler: books that have been reduced to nothing but words frequencies and trends, that tell you all you need to know about the work without your ever having to read it—and machines that then churn out future fake (or are they real?) books that have nothing to do with their supposed author. It’s a chilling thought.

The tools of mathematical and statistical and scientific analysis are invaluable. But their quantifiable certainty is all too easy to see as the only “real” way of doing things when really, it is but one tool and one approach—and not one that is translatable or applicable to all matters of qualitative phenomena. That’s one basic fact we’d do well not to forget."

"In 1959, a German computer scientist programmed a Zuse Z22 computer to cut up and recombine phrases from Franz Kafka's novel The Castle. The string of words spit out by the program reads like a Mad Libs mash-up of Kafka's original work. Who authored these computer-generated texts – the program, the programmer, or Kafka? Are they original poems, or merely derivative experiments? If derivative, where does "fair use" borrowing end and plagiarism begin? And can we consider the computer program itself a "text" in the same way as Kafka's novel?

This computer program is only one in a long history of experimental writing that cuts up, remixes and recombines language as a way of destroying the cohesiveness of writing. In this course, we'll look at ancient Latin cut-up poems; we'll play with seventeenth-century German paper instruments used to produce poetry during live performances; and we'll pull apart simple generative computer programs. Because these "texts" were written to be experienced, we will interact with them experimentally, pulling apart and remaking them – and our own writing – as a community. By engaging in these acts of intentional destruction, we will, together, crack open the mechanisms that make good writing work. Observing where language breaks down will lead us to a better understanding of what language is, as well as what it can do.

You cannot read the texts of this class without, in some sense, writing them, and we'll spend a good deal of time doing both in and out of class. As we test the limits of language, you will produce weekly short reflective blog posts on your discoveries. You will also be expected to respond at least twice a week to one of your classmates' posts. The point of this weekly writing is not to produce beautifully structured, perfectly grammatical compositions, but to get you in the habit of writing down your thoughts. In other words, the aim is for you to become comfortable participating in a written dialogue as a member of a community.

Once throughout the semester, you will design and carry out your own writing experiment in class. This can be something as simple as setting up a series of surrealist writing exercises for the class to participate in, or sharing and leading a discussion on a work of recombinant literature you've found. The week after, you will be expected to turn in lab report discussing what your experiment taught you about the practice of writing"

"I have had the good fortune to work at metaLAB this summer on an open-source tool for text analysis and visualization in the digital humanities. This effort, funded through the Google Summer of Code, is taking place under the tutelage of metaLAB’s own Matthew Battles and the historian and Harvard Junior Fellow Jo Guldi, who will be joining Brown University’s faculty in the fall.

Jo’s project is one of remarkable scope: to chart the history of land reform across the globe, making use of texts and archival data spanning more than a century. The spatial, temporal, and intellectual diffusion of land reform can already be traced in outline, thanks in large part to the scholars and archivists of prior generations who have assembled numerous bibliographies, archives, monographs and glossaries in their attempts to come to grips with the myriad outputs of “paper machines”: colonial administrations, government ministries, NGOs, utopian social movements, academic institutions, and other producers of texts dealing with land and its (re)distribution. But to look both more broadly at and more deeply into the data we have, to find the subtle patterns at unfathomable scales that are the digital humanities’ raison d’être, it is necessary to build new tools that can leverage the best extant algorithms in service of our human powers of perception and intuition."

"This paper begins with a consideration of the nature and risks of computational social science, followed by a focus on social media platforms as social science tools. We then discuss the aggregation of data and the expansion of computational social science along both horizontal and vertical axes. We consider the problems aggregation has raised in past social science research, as well as the potential problems raised by the use of social media as computational social science by business customers, government, platform providers and platform users; this discussion includes consideration of consumer protection, ethical codes, and civil liberty impacts. We end by highlighting the richness of social media data for computational social science research and the need to ensure this data is used ethically and the public is protected from abuse. The danger today is that computational social science is being used opaquely and near ubiquitously, without recognition or regard for the past debate on ethical social science experimentation."

"The Journal of Digital Humanities is a comprehensive, peer-reviewed, open access journal that features the best scholarship, tools, and conversations produced by the digital humanities community in the previous quarter."

"The new graphic arts devices are, I believe, capable of working the other way—as implements for a more [p.180] decentralized and less professionalized culture, a culture of local literature and amateur scholarship.

This possibility is especially important today, when electric power promises to develop the village at the expense of the metropolis, and when shorter working hours offer a prospect of leisure to a population of which an increasing proportion is being exposed to college education.

…

Today the Western scholar’s problem is not to get hold of the books that everyone else has read or is reading but rather to procure materials that hardly anyone else would think of looking at.

…

Western civilization now expects even poetry to fit the Procrustean bed of the publishing industry.

…

The art of conversation, with its counterpart the dialogue [p.186] as a literary form for presenting ideas, has also declined since the days of Galileo, while the art of advertising has advanced.

…"

[So much more, but another reaction: academics will always hope everyone is more like them.]

"The modern age of landscape is an age where social interactions, markets, and developments are routinely channeled by institutions invisible to the ordinary individual. State infrastructure and capital have made immense and irreversible the effects of building, in the form of corridors, monuments and waste, channeling everyday paths and interactions in new space. In the era of modern building, the secrets of landscape are constantly hidden in plain sight.

To learn to see the landscape, western writers first had to learn to describe it. Unlike studies of rhetoric, which stretch back through the classical tradition, structural studies of the phenomenology, politics, and psychology of landscape only matured in the nineteenth century, in the era when state intervention began to physically reshape the shape of trade, agriculture, and the city at an unprecedented scale. Psychologists like Georg Simmel and cultural critics like Walter Benjamin imported the science of rhetoric and the…"

"One of the great assets of the digital, and what it encourages and enables is multiple voices entering into a dialogue and creating new knowledge out of conversation and discussion."

"I was lucky enough to be taught by some of the greatest international authorities yet it was never assumed that their voice in the conversation was necessarily more important than mine. Far more important than who was talking was the quality of thought expressed and the nature of knowledge that emerged from the dialogue, and I think that's quite right."

"DH is…a collaborative field. We have to learn to work together and understand the different languages that are spoken by different partners in the dialogue: geeks, humanities scholars, information professionals, technical support people & indeed the public. In that sense, therefore, the voice of the DH scholar is of use as an interpreter between different languages & cultures. But interpreters cannot, but the nature of their job, exist in isolation."

"In the more than twenty years of its existence, Public Culture has established itself as a prize-winning, field-defining cultural studies journal. Public Culture seeks a critical understanding of the global cultural flows and the cultural forms of the public sphere which define the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. As such, the journal provides a forum for the discussion of the places and occasions where cultural, social, and political differences emerge as public phenomena, manifested in everything from highly particular and localized events in popular or folk culture to global advertising, consumption, and information networks.

Artists, activists, and both well-established and younger scholars, from across the humanities and social sciences and around the world, present some of their most innovative and exciting work in the pages of Public Culture."

"The problem is not the humanities as a discipline (who can blame a discipline?), the problem is its members. We are insufferable. We do not want change…do not want centrality…do not want to speak to nor interact with the world. We mistake the tiny pastures of private ideals with the megalopolis of real lives. We spin from our mouths retrograde dreams of the second coming of the nineteenth century whilst simultaneously dismissing out of our sphincters the far more earnest ambitions of the public at large—religion, economy, family, craft, science.

Humanists work hard, but at all the wrong things, the commonest of which is the fetid fester of a hypothetical socialist dreamworld, one that has become far more disconnected with labor and material than the neoliberalism it claims to replace.

Humanism does not deserve to carry the standard for humans, for frankly it despises them.

We don't reform our mission because we secretly hate the idea of partaking of and in the greater world…"

"The humanities needs more courage and more contact with the world. It needs to extend the practice of humanism into that world, rather than to invite the world in for tea and talk of novels, only to pat itself on the collective back for having injected some small measure of abstract critical thinking into the otherwise empty puppets of industry. As far as indispensability goes, we are not meant to be superheroes nor wizards, but secret agents among the citizens, among the scrap metal, among the coriander, among the parking meters. We earn respect by calling in worldly secrets, by making them public. The worldly spy is the opposite of the elbow-patched humanist, the one never out of place no matter the place. The traveler at home everywhere, with the luxury to look."

"There's a place for potted plants. Every practice has to spend time reflecting on itself and reorienting. There's nothing wrong with importing solutions from the outside, from which there is always much to be learned. But the lower faculties must resist the temptation to partake of daily life only just enough to mine convenient resources into makeshift parapets. It's not a cowardly move nor a treacherous one, but it's not a courageous nor a righteous one either. The digital humanities must decide if they are potting their digital plants in order to prettify the office, or to nurture saplings for later transfer into the great outdoors. Out there, in the messy, humid world of people and machines, it's better to cast off elbow patches for shirt-sleeves."

"But one look at the Mac & you could tell something was different. The white screen alone seemed revolutionary, after years of reading green text on a black background. And there were typefaces! I had been obsessed with typography since my grade-school years; here was a computer that treated fonts as an art, not just a clump of pixels. The then-revolutionary graphic interface made the screen feel like a space you wanted to inhabit, to make your own. To paraphrase Le Corbusier, the Mac was a machine you wanted to live in.

Before long I was creating page layouts for student-run philosophy journals; I designed research tools using the visionary Hypercard application…

Looking back now, I realize that beneath all those surface obsessions, a theme was running through my interests like an underground river, & it didn't fully surface until my mid-20s: the sense that the most fertile and engaging space in our culture lay at the intersection between new technology and the humanities."

""Over the past century, the UK has stopped nurturing its polymaths. You need to bring art and science back together."…

"It was a time when the same people wrote poetry and built bridges," he said. "Lewis Carroll didn't just write one of the classic fairytales of all time. He was also a mathematics tutor at Oxford. James Clerk Maxwell was described by Einstein as among the best physicists since Newton – but was also a published poet."

Schmidt's comments echoed sentiments expressed by Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, who revealed this week that he was stepping down. "The Macintosh turned out so well because the people working on it were musicians, artists, poets and historians – who also happened to be excellent computer scientists," Jobs once told the New York Times."

"…digital archivists solve the barrier of accessibility, by making content previously tucked away in analog archives available to the world wide web…

What great curators do is reverse-engineer this dynamic, framing cultural importance first to magnify our motivation to engage with information…shares that manuscript in the context of how it relates to today’s ideals and challenges of publishing, to our shared understanding of creative labor and the changing value systems of authorship, will help integrate this archival item with your existing knowledge and interests, bridging your curiosity with your motivations to truly engage with the content.

Because in a culture where abundance has replaced scarcity as our era’s greatest information problem, without these human sensemakers and curiosity sherpas, even the most abundant and accessible information can remain tragically “rare.”"

"Even if mapping isn't your personal interest, digitised archives or artefacts can provide a stimulus for meaningful learning designs and contexts for all stages of learning. Applying digital tools to data we already have allows new interpretations and ways of using the data which makes this a very rich field for educators to explore using digital technologies.

And whilst at first glance, some of the artefacts and ideas from the past may seem absurd today; in context, they reveal the hidden codes for our future, which are gaining recognition amongst an emerging cohort of paleo-futurists, digital humanists, digital anthropologists & archaeologists who participate in innovative projects and networks. As Tom Seinfield from the Found History blog states:

"innovation in digital humanities frequently comes from the edges of the scholarly community rather than from its center—small institutions and even individual actors with few resources are able to make important innovations.""

"Now historians have a new tool that can help. Advanced technology similar to Google Earth, MapQuest and the GPS systems used in millions of cars has made it possible to recreate a vanished landscape. This new generation of digital maps has given rise to an academic field known as spatial humanities. Historians, literary theorists, archaeologists and others are using Geographic Information Systems — software that displays and analyzes information related to a physical location — to re-examine real and fictional places like the villages around Salem, Mass., at the time of the witch trials; the Dust Bowl region devastated during the Great Depression; and the Eastcheap taverns where Shakespeare’s Falstaff and Prince Hal caroused."

"Cultural Analytics is the term we coined to describe computational analysis of massive cultural and social data sets and data flows. Over last 15-10 years, cultural analytics came to structure contemporary media universe, cultural production and consumption, and cultural memory. Search engines, spam detection, Netflix and Amazon recommendations, Last.fm, Flickr "interesting" photo rankings, movie success predictions, tools such as Google n-gram viewer, Trends, Insights for Search, content-based image search, and and numerous other applications and services all rely on cultural analytics. This work is carried out in media industries and in academia by researchers in data mining, social computing, media computing, music information retrieval, computational linguistics, and other areas of computer science."

"For those reasons, I’ve still been reluctant to say too much, especially on the open web. There are plenty of privacy issues that go way beyond myself…

But since so much of my life now, so many of my friendships, happen online, and since I’m determined to not let fear or anxiety about what I do or don’t say control how I feel about the world, this seems like as good a time as any to tell a whole lot more people all at once.

As Jeff Mangum put it in Neutral Milk Hotel’s song “Ghost,” I’m resolved to “never be afraid / to watch the morning paper blow / into a hole / where no one can escape.” Or as xkcd put it in the comic “dreams” (This is actually the very last part of my talk), Fuck. That. Shit.

It’s an experience — one that’s always ongoing — that broke my heart and changed my life, irrevocably, for the better. Orders of magnitude better. It taught me who I was and is teaching me who I am. I can’t explain it any better than that."

"What we share with our ancestors, though, is the sense of excess. Most Internet searches will turn up vastly more results than can be used. Too much of the bad stuff, not enough of the good, has been the subtext of complaints about overload from the beginning. But like the early modern compilers, we too are devising ways to cope. In many ways, our key methods of coping with overload haven’t changed since the 16th century: We still need to select, summarize, and sort, and ultimately need human judgment and attention to guide the process."

"A number of educational theorists are advocating increased attention on teaching students skills, rather than merely focusing on their mastery of abstract content. Influential reports like Henry Jenkins, et al.'s "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century" & the New Media Consortium's Horizon Project have outlined the skills that students need to be active participants in new media culture. As educators working with digital media, we need to begin to seriously think of our work as a form of apprenticeship, where we ask ourselves: what sorts of skills are we modeling for our students? And how are those skills preparing them for the future?

...With an educational model based on apprenticeship, educators could deemphasize the role of rote memorization and testing that are now used to rank and sort students, and rather focus on mastering the skills that students need to be engaged citizens in the digital age."